Here's a refresher of basic holiday changes you need to activate on your website. The goal of these changes is signify to your users that the holiday season has arrived and to provide a faster method of finding the gifts they need.

The first change you should make on your website is something subtle to represent the season. BlueNile.com is using an elegant snowflake background on their website already. These snowflakes appeared on November 1st just as they started sending holiday marketing emails.

Last year I saw many jewelers incorporate snowmen, evergreens, snowflakes, or wreaths as part of their store logo in the header of their website. Each of these changes should be relatively easy for your web designer.

The next change you should make on your site is to organize jewelry items into categories that will make the shopping process faster and provide links to pages that show those individual categories.

For example, here are 8 popular categories I see every year, and have already seen this year:

If possible, you should put these 8 links in your mane navigation. This will give customers a very easy way to browse your website for specifically what they are looking for instead of forcing them to browse through your entire online catalog.

You should carefully select in-stock items of various prices for each of those special categories. It's easier for an ecommerce website to sell beads and pendants under $100 than most other jewelry. Over the last 12 months I've noticed that most online sales are below the $200 price point.

Prior to 2008 the online purchase price limit was around $487. People would think twice before making online purchases greater than that amount. My current belief is that the $487 has dropped to $189, but I don't have enough hard numbers to back up that claim, i.e. it's my educated guess based on a small sampling.

Get started with these website changes it you haven't already. Hopefully your webmaster can make these changes rapidly for you without worry. The most time consuming part will be for you to write up a list of items for each of those 8 categories. Hopefully you have the photos too, otherwise ask your webmaster to source them from your vendors.

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